Splinx Studio
Every year a handful of design ideas go round the industry, get copied onto a few thousand websites, and then quietly become the thing that makes those sites look dated.
We're not against any of it in principle. Some trends are genuinely good ideas that stuck. The problem is the reasoning. "This is what good sites look like right now" is not a reason to do something to a business you're being paid to help.
The test we use instead
When there's a disagreement about a design decision, we settle it with three questions in order.
Does it help someone finish what they came to do? Every visitor arrives with a job in mind. Find out if you handle their kind of work. Check the price. See whether you've done this before for someone like them. Get in touch. If a change makes any of those faster or clearer, it's earning its place.
What does it cost? Not money, weight. A full screen background video costs several seconds of load time on a phone. A carousel costs you the four slides nobody scrolls to. Those costs are real and they get paid by every single visitor, while the benefit usually goes to the one person who asked for the feature.
Would we still do it if nobody in the industry ever saw the site? This is the useful one. It separates decisions made for the client's customers from decisions made for our portfolio, and the second kind is more common than most studios will admit.
If a visitor consciously notices your animation, it has probably already cost you more than it earned.
What this looks like in practice
The unglamorous stuff wins more often than you'd think. Putting the phone number where a thumb can reach it. Writing a heading that says what you actually do rather than something abstract about journeys and passion. Cutting a five field contact form down to three. Showing prices, or at least a range, when everyone in the industry hides them.
Those changes rarely make a design look impressive in a screenshot. They're just the ones that move the number the client cares about.
Where trends genuinely help
To be fair, some of what gets called trend is really just craft catching up. Bigger type is easier to read. Generous spacing helps people scan. Dark interfaces are kinder to your eyes at night. Fast, subtle motion helps you understand that something changed on screen instead of teleporting.
We use all of those, constantly. The difference is that we can explain why each one is there in terms of the person using the site, not in terms of what launched on a design gallery last month.
The honest trade-off
Designing this way means occasionally telling a client that the thing they saw on a competitor's site is a bad idea, and being ready to explain why. It also means our work sometimes looks calmer than it could have been.
We'll take that trade. A site that looks slightly less exciting and books twice as many calls is not a compromise, it's the entire point.